The Boot Is Featured on Their Menu

The well-dressed businessman stared at a hand-printed sign warning that the owners of a small restaurant “will continue to refuse serving negative people.”

“I’d never eat there,” he said, turning away.

Tough, say the owners of Dardanelles restaurant.

“If people don’t like the sign, or don’t like us, that’s their problem, not ours,” said Levent Yueksel, who owns the trendy 32-seat restaurant with his wife, Sherri Kane. “I know it’s bad for business. But I don’t care.

“There are two kinds of people you don’t disrespect. The people who heal you and the people who feed you.”

Yueksel, 34, and Kane, 27, have grown tired of customers who demand their food in a hurry. Weary of diners who are rude. Bothered by patrons who want them to turn down their music. Annoyed by people who want to use credit cards. Disgusted with smokers.

So they posted that warning sign, which begins: “This is a private restaurant. Very soon, we will open for our regulars. Until then, we will gladly serve selected newcomers. . . .”

“It’s just a sign,” Yueksel said recently as he and Kane tended to a brisk dinner crowd. “We let everyone in.”

The sign also, however, uses a common, earthy term for part of the human anatomy to describe “negative people” they’d just as soon see turn around and leave.

The sign outrages some would-be customers.

“Someone put Crazy Glue on the locks,” Yueksel said. “People call, they say, ‘I’m going to ruin you.’ ”

The menu is largely seafood with a Mediterranean flair. And it’s reasonably priced for a restaurant that has been recognized by at least one critic as being among the top 100 restaurants in a city that has several of the nation’s best. The most expensive entree is $16.

Yueksel buys his seafood fresh each morning. He leaves most of the cooking to his chef, Gary Polowczuk. Yueksel and Kane both wait on tables.

Yueksel was born in Germany, reared in France and spent time in Japan before coming to the United States four years ago.

Kane, from Philadelphia, is an aspiring actress who says she once worked in a New York City establishment that catered to men who liked to be whipped.

Yueksel has decorated the walls with drawings of spaceships and aliens. A large sign above a William Burroughs’ poem informs patrons: “We Like to Play Our Music Loud.”

The music could be anything from jazz to heavy metal. If Yueksel is in the mood, he plugs in his guitar and starts playing. Loud.

Anyone who complains is usually told to just talk louder.

On one recent night, Kane decided two patrons had registered a bit too high on the negative scale.

“They are ordering me around. No one orders me around,” Kane told her husband before they ordered the two men to leave.

“They asked for silverware,” Kane explained. “I didn’t get it fast enough and they got bossy.”

A 20-minute wait for silverware is not uncommon.

Then there was the party of six that got chicken banned from the menu.

Kane says she sensed trouble the minute they ordered. Everyone wanted chicken.

“You get six people ordering chicken, it’s like a red alert for trouble,” she said. “I told them we were running low, that they could have two orders and try something else as well.”

They insisted. She gave in.

One of the women complained that her chicken was underdone. She slammed her plate on the counter of the open kitchen and told Polowczuk to do something rude with the bird.

Then the woman’s large, tattooed boyfriend grabbed Yueksel by the throat and threw him into the kitchen and “the restaurant looked like a bar from a movie Western,” Kane said.

Kane said she feels bad that people misunderstand their sign. And them.

“We’re not bad people,” she said. “If you ask for something nicely, you’ll get it.”